The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Here's a sample diet calculation just to share my experience, potentially catch any errors and commit to the process.
I am 37 and weigh 77 kilograms. I hit the gym two times a week (not "a couple" of times) and would like to go back to going three times a week when things at work go back to normal. I am small-boned and don't put on muscle easily, so my 77kg include a couple of love handles and I would like to slim down to 72kg without losing much muscle. This should help me get to seven pull-ups and put my body fat percentage at 17%.
Step one: maintenance diet, as-is
There are lots of various ballpark estimators of your daily caloric needs online and they are all the same. I picked the first one, plugged in my sex, age, weight and level of physical activity and got 2310kcal.
Skeletal muscles are the body's luxury organs, so unless you perform manual labor for a living, the body will eagerly deflate them if you don't eat enough protein or keep them stimulated. To keep the muscles fed, you need about 2g of protein per kg of body weight. That's 154 grams.
NB: Precision is not really important, I am not planning to weigh my food and you shouldn't either, but I can't be arsed to round everything my small homemade diet planner does.
Then there's fat. You don't want to go below 0.66g/kg (or your hormones will act up) or above 0.88kg/g (no real benefit and your portions will start getting too small to be satiating). So, 51 to 68 grams per day.
Fill the rest with carbs. The formula for calories per gram of protein/fat/carbs is 4-9-4, so this leaves us with 271-309 carbs.
Calories: 2310
Protein: 154
Fat: 51-68
Carbs: 271-309
Step 2: smoke testing the numbers
I then itemized everything I ate during the last few days. It's a bit of a hassle, going to the fridge and recording everything of importance, but you only have to do it once. Homemade soups and stews are the biggest hurdle, so I cheated: for the soups you can copy the macros from your local food delivery service, and for the stews just do the big stuff: meat, potatoes, veggies. Restaurant soups are usually fattier than homemade ones, so things should cancel themselves out.
Turns out I've been eating at maintenance and hitting my protein goals, but eating a bit too much fat. Given that I haven't been getting fatter or growing bigger muscles recently, that result made sense, so I was ready to take the next step.
Step 3: weight-loss diet
Now that I had all the data I need, I could calculate both my weight loss diet and compare it to my recent menus. Gentle dieting means eating about 500 kcal less than your maintenance calories, keeping your protein intake fixed, bringing yout fat intake in line with the guidelines and filling the rest with carbs. This should result in about 500 grams of weight loss per week. Plugging the numbers into the formula, we get:
Calories: 1810
Protein: 154
Fat: 51-68
Carbs: 146-184
With this data, I could then start fiddling around with my diet, trying to bring it in line with the new goal. When everything is in a bunch of tables, it's quite easy to play around with numbers. There were some easy changes: that 3.2% milk you add to your protein shakes does add up to 130 extra calories you can slash from your diet if you switch to 1% milk or 330 if you switch to water. Then I just had to slash a little bit here and there to get where I wanted.
I also planned to add an hour of walking to my daily schedule. First of all, it's extra 250 kcal of energy expended: as I lose weight, my daily maintenance calories will slowly reduce to 2160, leaving me with only 350kcal worth of deficit; it will also function as a safety buffer against things I might miss in my diet.
Step 4: maintenance diet, to be
When the dieting is done, I will need to adjust my diet to the new caloric balance:
Calories: 2160
Protein: 144
Fat: 47-63
Carbs: 253-289
Basically, no real changes (+/-10 grams of protein is nothing), just a chance to eat starchy sides more often.
Miscellaneous
The biggest hurdle was getting my wife on board. She doesn't like scrawny dudes, I kept telling her that 72kg isn't scrawny at all, she kept disagreeing, but I nagged and nagged until she relented. She didn't even roll her eyes when I went through the fridge and the pantry, taking pictures of nutritional value labels. In return I didn't force her to weigh anything. As I've written above, I am fine with eyeballing stuff.
Despite the changes required to achieve this caloric deficit being so small, I can feel it. I go to sleep without feeling full and actually look forward to having breakfast when I wake up.
Calorie tracking turned out to be easier than it sounds. Everything you buy ready to eat is easy to keep track of and you only have to calculate the values for the stuff you cook once.
The numbers look good enough. Your protein calculations should ideally be based on muscle mass and not body weight, but it's not worth doing all that, just overestimate by a fair margin and you'll be good. Get on BCAAs and creatine if you are not on it already, you'll need it for the cut.
The psychological process of cutting sucks. Your lifts go down in weight, tired and hungry all the time, etc. I am 78kg (170lbs) at 14% body fat right now, which is by sane measures "healthy" but I'd need to get around 10% or below for visible abs and a more "aesthetic face" I am really dreading the process of starting a cut, I feel great right now, high energy levels, plenty of physical strength, etc. I don't even know if it will be worth looking marginally better.
But you definitely need to cut if you are 77kg at greater than 17%bf (assuming your height is below 6'2).
Well, the leaner you are, the harder it must be to cut, as you have to steer your metabolism away from the muscles and towards the remaining body fat. If I ever get to 14% at 78kg I think I'll be ecstatic.
I do. I don't trust my Chinese smart scale too much, but its figures match what I see in the mirror
Assuming your height is around 5-10-6'1, given your current stats. It should be possible 1.5 years from now for you to achieve 14% at 78kg. I'm overestimating a bit because you are 37 and if you can't do 7 pullups, some foundation needs to be laid. Expect around 3 bulk-cut cycles.
It's not a bad place to be, but bodybuilding is a bottomless pit. First, you want the bicep definition, then you want the bicep mass, then you want the mass and definition, then you want the popping bicep vein, then you want the popping bicep vein without a pump, then you want the vein to be visible from a mile away.
A lot of bodybuilders have body dysmorphia but in the opposite direction as teenage females, they think they are too small. lol
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